Bookshelf

If Aesop is right and a man can be judged by the company he keeps a mind can perhaps be judged by the books it reads (or desires to?).

Below are books that I've liked and disliked, loved and hated, laughed about and cried into. Most of them, though, are yet to be read. Of the ones I have read I've starred those I found particular insightful or moving. Just like my physical bookshelf, they are in no particular order. If I've read the book in another language (I squeak by in French and Spanish) I've left it in the original.

Some other people whose book recommendations I always find interesting:
-Patrick Collison
-Tyler Cowen
-Ben Casnocha

In no particular order:

• Dancing in the Glory of Monsters

• King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

• Hard Landing:The Epic Contest for Power and Profits That Plunged the Airlines into Chaos

• The Trouble With Prosperity: The Loss of Fear, the Rise of Speculation, and the Risk to American Savings

• The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

• In Other Rooms, Other Wonders: Connected Stories

• Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism

• Letters to a Young Poet

• Man's Search for Meaning

• The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet

• The Complete Essays of Montaigne

• "What Do You Care What Other People Think?": Further Adventures of a Curious Character

• The Essential Keynes

• Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

• Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

• The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought

• Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange: A Financial History of Victorian Science

• In the light of what we know

• A Fine Balance

• The Federalist Papers

• Americanah

• Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

• The First and Last Freedom

• Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

• The Most Important Thing Illuminated: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor

• War and Peace

• Crime and Punishment

• Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel

• Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

• CEO, China: The Rise of Xi Jinping

• How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

• Tao Te Ching

• The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

• A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Graz Schumpeter Lectures)

• Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism

• Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation

• Ficciones

• Le Grand Meaulnes

• La Ciudad y Los Perros

• Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

• How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

• Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America

• Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China

• Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

• Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

• The Angle of Repose

• Moral Man and Immoral Society: A study in Ethics and Politics

• Cutting for Stone

• The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: selected essays and address

• The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

• Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

• Black Swan

• Stubborn Attachments

• The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better

• Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

• Tea Time with Terrorists: A Motorcycle Journey into the Heart of Sri Lanka's Civil War

• The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

• Maoism: A Global History

• The Elephant Whisperer: My Life with the Herd in the African Wild

• Fooling Some of the People All of the Time: A Long Short Story

• How Asia Works

• Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

• The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

• Fooled by Randomness

• Alibaba's World: How a Remarkable Chinese Company is Changing the Face of Global Business

• On the Shortness of Life

• Triumph of the City

• Let the Great World Spin

• My Name is Red

• Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid that Avenged Pearl Harbor

• Stoner

• Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

• Letters to a Young Contrarian

• Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story

  • I'm a sucker for spy stories. Jack Devine's career was enormously varied and interesting. Very different perspective on the agency that the one created in popular media. Defends their work during the Allende coup and generally makes the case (quite convincingly) that the CIA's work is a lot more contingent and tenuous than their popular image lets on. Stories of recruiting sources and games with other spy agencies made me realize how tough human spy operations are to pull off.

• The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

  • One of the best non fiction books of 2020. Ambitious work that debunks an enormous swath of social science. Countless examples of things we think are true for humans which are really only true for a subset (cleverly termed WEIRD).

• Life and Fate

• Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

• Himalaya: A Human History

  • Fascinating and well researched account of the various peoples that have lived in the region. Was a bit out of my depth in terms of the region's history and the sheer number of characters who are covered. There should be more geographies of places was my main takeaway. That and I'd love the opportunity to spend time in the Himalaya at some point.

• The Art of Fielding

  • Couldn't actually get into this. I played Baseball as a kid but this just didn't have the legs for me.

• The Brothers Karamazov

• The English and their History

• The Craft: How Freemasons Made the Modern World

• Lifespan: Why We Age and Why We Don't Have to

• Sovietistan: A Journey Through Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan

  • Just finished this excellent, easy read (June 2021). Not as scholarly as Himalaya, more of a travelogue but within the theme of stories about places. Most surprising thing was how different each country seems from her descriptions despite the fact that we tend to lump them in together. Politically, historically (especially recently) and economically the countries are very different. This begs the question that underlies much of the book: are the Stans at all representative of the people living in them or the different tribes and traditions of the region. Probably not. Would like to read her next book The Border

• The Quiet Americans: Four CIA spies at the Dawn of the Cold War